 Dear students, I welcome you in the course of leadership, emotional intelligence and decision making. This is module number 151 and we are going to talk about making smart decisions. When we talk about smart decisions, we mean to say that we have already defined smart objectives and to meet those objectives, we have to take certain decisions and those decisions are going to give us the desired outcome. In that regard, when we talk about emotional intelligence, we have to be very much careful that sometimes the leaders can make bad decisions and there can be certain reasons that why those decisions are not up to the mark. To investigate those basically decisions and the further detail, let's start covering the slide. First of all, we are going to talk about that companies can avoid many flawed decisions that are caused by the way our brains are going to operate because our brain are sometimes having reflex actions and those reflex actions are not actually accompanied by the rationality. So we have to see that how the leaders are going to define different decisions. Now remember that leaders make decisions largely through unconscious processes and those unconscious processes are basically their brain waves, their vibes which they are going to have to come up with certain outcomes as a decision. And those unconscious processes are basically accompanied and are coming out of that neuro scientific procedures and are also called pattern recognition. So these are the important things that we have to understand. Our unconscious processes generate through our neural network and we recognize certain patterns and we also go for tagging our emotions that what are we feeling, why we are feeling, how we are feeling. So our unconscious mind is processing all those emotions. So these processes usually make for quick effective decisions that can be distorted by bias. Now the quick decision making in which we involve heuristics which means judgmental shortcut. So those heuristics sometimes can create biases in which we can come up with hollow effect, we can talk about stereotype, we can talk about recency effect or recency error. So these are all the biases which one can have which also includes selective perception and likewise so many others are also there. So we have to be careful that when we are making decisions we should not be coming up with the biases. The second aspect is that managers need to find systematic ways to recognize the sources of bias that why you are biased. Sometimes those biases can be generated through your value system as well. So we have to be careful about these biases. So red flag conditions is a term that your author has used that we can identify which aspects are there in which we can be biased. And then design safeguards, we will have to see the corrective action or precautionary measures, that introduce more analysis, greater debate or stronger governance. So we will have checks and balances, marits on which we can overcome our biases. Likewise, why good leaders make bad decisions, authors say that the authors identified three of the red flag conditions as the presence of or three situations. The first one is inappropriate self-interest which means according to research can bias even be well-intentioned professionals such as doctors and auditors, the bias that can be done by the professionals. They are in the market, they are in the industry, they know the field and still they are sometimes biased because of certain perceptions, certain development, psychodynamic perspectives of their mind factors. The second thing we have is about the issues of bad decisions and that is distorting attachments. Distorting attachments to people, places and the things. These three things can develop some of our associations, our escalation of commitment can build up. For example, and executives, reluctance to sell a business unit they have worked in because it is possible that with that business unit, there is a special association where they do not want to end the association. Similarly, the third factor we have is misleading memories which may seem relevant and comparable to the current situation but lead our thinking down the wrong path by obscuring important differentiating factors. So what will happen in that situation is that our mind sticks with a particular memory, with a past association and we cannot change it. That is the reason, few of the aspects that we have discussed, in which the good leaders are sometimes unable to make appropriate decisions. Dear students, we have just seen that sometimes good leaders are unable to make rational and appropriate decisions because their biases are going to affect them and those effects are basically causing their decisions to be of minimum value. And sometimes those decisions are not there to come up with right creativity and innovation and the reason behind all these situations is basically their emotional control which is not actually in their control. So we have to be careful about such things that what are the triggers, what are the stimulus which is going to cause trouble for us. If we conclude all these things, then remember that good leaders who are there to lead, who are there to motivate and encourage the people can also have biases and they will have to learn how to overcome their biases. They will not be able to end their biases but through emotional intelligence, self-awareness, self-control, empathy, they can control their biases and prejudice attitude. Thank you.